d nearly, for her hands were cold and the tears
falling when she examined my covers, and felt my face and hands before
she went to bed. My, but the mother of a family like ours is never
short of a lot of things to think of!

I had a new one myself. Now what do you suppose there was about that
man?

Of course after having lived all her life with father and Laddie,
Shelley would know how a man should look, and act to be right; and this
one must have been right to make her bloom out in winter the way other
things do in spring; and now what could be wrong? Maybe city girls
were prettier than Shelley. But all women were made alike on the
outside, and that was as far as you could see. You couldn't find out
whether they had pure blood, true hearts, or clean souls. No girl
could be so very much prettier than Shelley; they simply were not made
that way. She knew how to behave; she had it beaten into her, like all
of us. And she knew her books, what our schools could teach her, and
Groveville, and Lucy, who had city chances for years, and there never
was a day at our house when books and papers were not read and
discussed, and your spelling was hammered into you standing in rows
against the wall, and memory tests--what on earth could be the matter
with Shelley that a man who could make her look and act as she did at
Christmas, would now make her unhappy? Sometimes I wanted to be grown
up dreadfully, and again, times like that, I wished my bed could stay
in mother's room, and I could creep behind father's paper and go to
sleep between his coat and vest, and have him warm my feet in his hands
forever.

This world was too much for me. I never worked and worried in all my
life as I had over Laddie and the Princess, and Laddie said I, myself,
never would know how I had helped him. Of course nothing was settled;
he had to try to make her love him by teaching her how lovable he was.
We knew, because we always had known him, but she was a stranger and
had to learn. It was mighty fine for him that he could force his way
past the dogs, Thomas, the other men, her half-crazy father, and
through the locked door, and go there to try to make her see, on Sunday
nights, and week days, every single chance he could invent, and he
could think up more reasons for going to Pryors' than mother could for
putting out an extra wash.

Now just as I got settled a little about him, and we could see they
really wanted him there, at least the